Tell us about your business challenges

Challenge

How do you mark hundreds of roads? It used to take a village and a whole lot of coordination.

First, you schedule 180 geographically-dispersed crew members to hit the pavement, so to speak, at different shifts. At the end of their day, each employee records hours they worked on a paper timesheet. That’s 180 timesheets and 7,200 time entries. Every superintendent compiles these timecards and mails them to the main office to be manually processed by 4 full-time billing clerks. That’s $70K in shipping and handling fees every year, 160 hours of staff hours each month, and a plenty of room for error. And all these costs are incurred even before anyone gets paid.

Put simply, when this client came to SPINEN, they were in a dire need of fixing these inefficiencies. They knew their business well and knew what had to change, but required experts who understood how to leverage today’s technology to solve complex problems.

In short, they were our perfect client.

Solution

After hours of perusing timesheets, evaluating workflows and interviewing the staff, SPINEN first developed the wireframes for the custom time-tracking application. Once approved and tested, the wireframes were turned into a slick, tree- and tablet-friendly app that replaced the paper trail and completely digitized time submissions with an intuitive, clean interface.

SPINEN understood that a nice app is useless if it’s not adapted across the entire organization, so accessibility was vital to the success of this project. That’s why most of the interaction is performed with a drag-and-drop feature that’s easy for anyone – whether tech savvy or tech averse – to master.

Using the app on an iPad, superintendents in the field can now easily assign projects to crew members, set project rates, schedule equipment usage, record hours worked and much more. At the end of the working week, the crew members electronically sign off on their timesheets which are then synced to the company’s accounting software. In the office, billing clerks can now access and review timecards using and easy-to-use desktop admin interface rather than sorting through reams of paper records.

Our time-tracking application overhauled the company’s crew management process from the bottom up while cutting expenses, eliminating costly errors and increasing productivity. Even better, the app paid for itself in just 7 months. Now that’s a return on investment and then some.

Expect accelerated changes in the way technology will shape your business in 2019.